Babolain.  From the French of Gustave Droz.  New York:  Henry Holt & Co.

This is a tragical little romance which draws the reader along with it by every line in every page, yet its power is derived from the resources of caricature:  it is rather the hollow side of a comic mask than a true expression of pathos.  Scientific and stupid, Professor Babolain enters the world of Paris armed with his innocence, his uncle’s legacy, his deep learning and his utter ignorance.  A couple of adventuresses, mother and daughter, swoop down upon him as a lawful prey, and he is quickly a doting husband and a terrified son-in-law.  The sole redeeming trait about the younger woman, who is a beauty and who paints, is that she never makes the least pretence of loving him:  in his first moments of adoration she mystifies him heartlessly, crushing him with her wit and confounding him with her art:  “Difficult? oh no!  In the first place, you need rabbits’ hair:  that is indispensable.  If you had no rabbits, or if you were in a country where rabbits had no hair, painting could not be thought of.”  She never melts, except when he presents her with a riviere of diamonds, and, after finding a leisure moment to give birth to a little girl, rushes off to Italy with Count Vaugirau, followed promptly by a certain Timoleon.  This Timoleon, who loves her unsuccessfully, is the beneficiary of poor Babolain, borrowing his money at the same time that he tries to borrow his wife, and returning with outrageous reproaches to the hero impoverished and desolate.  This precious friend is a specimen of all the rest.  The very daughter, sole consolation of her parent’s straitened existence, but ill fulfills the rapturous anticipations of early fatherhood.  He is at first her nurse and teacher:  “I saw the satin-like skin of her little neck, and behind her ear, fresh and pink like the petal of a flower, the soft curls upon the nape of her neck, half hair, half down, sucking in with their greedy roots the sweet juices of this living cream.”  He throws his hat into the river to teach her the laws of gravity.  But she grows up ungrateful and estranged, and, having married an ambitious physician, allows her father to live as a neglected pensioner under a part of her roof.  The details of Babolain’s decline are exquisitely painful, but partake of that style of exaggeration and caricature which causes even the heartless beings who make up his world to seem more like grotesque puppets with bosoms of wood than responsible beings to be really execrated and condemned.  As the abused victim, starving and ragged, treads the road of sacrifice to death, our sympathy is checked by the consciousness of his unmitigated and needless pliancy, until we withhold the tribute of sorrow due to the misfortunes of a Lear or a Pere Goriot.  The romance, however, though sketched out extravagantly between hyperbole and parable, fairly scintillates with brilliancies and good things:  we could hardly indicate another